Cloud ≠ You are off the hook!

While discussing with my customers about cloud, I come across recurring themes of misconception about what are their responsibilities towards protecting their workload in the cloud. So I decided to blog about my responses and help others who have similar conversations with their customers.

Cloud ≠ Zero downtime

This is the number 1 misconception I come across. Customers think that when they put their VMs in the cloud, they think that they automatically get 100% or 99.999% uptime as advertised in the cloud provider's site. This is True and False!

What is true is, cloud providers guarantee 99.xxx% uptime. Any downtime that arises due to issues in their cloud platform such as storage, networking etc. is covered in this uptime calculations.

What is NOT true is, downtime arising due to issues in the VM such as, application failure, storage (VHDX) corruption are NOT considered as downtime by the cloud provider. This also includes any scheduled downtime from the cloud provider.

Solution - The first and foremost solution is to design your solution for the fault domain and update domains (AWS speak - Availability domain). This means that you should have at least 2 VMs per role (or tier)

Cloud ≠ Backup-less solution

Another misconception with customers who are evaluating to move their applications to cloud is that they can do away with backups finally! Well this again is True and False.

What is true is, Backup-less solutions can be designed and deployed in cloud, provided they suit your requirement. Example: Stateless applications in VMs (PaaS) that does not require daily backup.

Moving your application to cloud does not change a thing as far as backup requirements go. You will still need to backup applications (SQL DB, applications, VM etc.) on a daily basis. Cloud data can infact be lost (or corrupted).

Solution - Design your solution to include a backup strategy from either by the cloud provider or your on-premises solution. While choosing the backup solution, you need to keep in mind that cloud provider's backup solution will usually only charge for the storage utilized as no data moves in or out. Whereas if you decide to backup using a on-premises solution, it will utilize the network quota, which is usually for egress only, hence incurring charges on a daily basis.

 Cloud ≠ High-Availability and DR not needed

This misconception goes hand in hand with the first one. Cloud providers don't provide inbuilt high availability for the VMs or the applications you deploy. Neither do they provide disaster recovery.

Cloud providers usually provide high availability in terms of fault domains (or availability domain) and regions, the responsibility to design an application for HA is still with the customer. Similarly, for disaster recovery (DR) cloud providers offer solutions such as Azure Site Recovery (ASR) which allows you to orchestrate your own DR solution.

What other misconceptions have you heard from your customers and how did you answer those? Please comment and let others know.